2013-14 Postdoctoral Fellows

Daniel Bessner

Daniel Bessner

Daniel Bessner received his Ph.D. in history from Duke University in May 2013 with a dissertation that examined German exiles' foreign policymaking roles during the early Cold War. As a postdoctoral fellow, he worked on several projects, including a book manuscript provisionally entitled Democracy in Exile: Hans Speier and the Rise of the Defense Intellectual (under contract with the U.S. in the World series at Cornell University Press). He also wrote an article that examined the problems and prospects of interdisciplinary collaboration at the RAND Corporation in the 1950s. The article eventually appeared in the Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences. He is broadly interested in the role intellectuals historically played as foreign policymakers and advisers, and the process by which foreign policy is made. He is now an Assistant Professor of International Studies in the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington.

Javier Osorio

Javier Osorio

Javier Osorio recently graduated from the Ph.D. program in Political Science at the University of Notre Dame. His main research agenda is focused on disentangling the micro-dynamics behind the onset, escalation and diffusion of drug related violence in Mexico. To analyze these dynamics, he created a geo-referenced database of daily events of drug violence in Mexico of about 9.8 million observations. To build this database, Javier co-developed “Eventus ID”, a novel software for automated textual annotation of event data from reports written in Spanish. To conduct his research, Javier received support from the National Science Foundation; the Program of Order, Conflict and Violence at Yale University; the Social Science Research Council ─ Open Society Foundations; the United States Institute of Peace; the Kellogg Institute for International Studies; and The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation. He is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY.